wake up, do
by planet p
Summary: Alternate ending for series six's "The Almost People". New Jen-centric.


**wake up, do** by planet p

**Disclaimer** I don't own _Doctor Who_ or any of its characters.

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><p>"You're like a little kid, Jen. Havin' a moment. Suddenly, someone's payin' attention to you, and you've gone a little crazy, in love with it, with the power that's suddenly yours. It's not you, Jen. In a day, a week, it'll wear off, you'll come back down to Earth, and you won't know what to do with yourself, you'll feel so... disparate. Please just stop, Jen. Stop, before you do something you won't be able to forgive yourself for. You imagine you're misunderstood and we're oh so bad! But, Jennifer, you're a part of it, too. You're not tryin' to understand, you're usin' the whole thing as one big excuse, you big baby. You killed Jen. You killed her. She's dead. Our Jen."<p>

"I am Jennifer Lucas!" Jennifer's ganger screamed, eyes full of dark, glinting rage, nothing like Jen's eyes; the face contorted.

"No, love, you're not," Buzzer corrected her, standing his ground. "You're _you_! You're not Jennifer, and Jennifer wasn't you. You just thought you were Jennifer 'cause you had her memories. Jen would've understood that. You're not thinkin' straight, doll. You're not you. Snap back to it, give it up. You are not this... monster! You're a part of us, now. You're alive. You've made your point. Look into your memory, into Jennifer's memories. Can you see it? Everybody gets hurt, everybody suffers. You're not the only one. You live with it, if you're lucky, and you move on, you work on making the world a better place for your children, and your children's children." He was amazed she'd let him go on, thought she'd have "ganked" him by now, offed him by now, the way she'd done Jennifer, the _real_ Jennifer. Oh, he was willing to admit this Jennifer doppelganger alive, living, but he would not pander to her belief that she _was_ Jennifer. That was pure fiction!

"I can grow," she repeated, as though this was meant to demonstrate something profound.

"Oh, you say you can," he replied. "You say you can grow, but can you change? Can you grow emotionally?"

"I am strong!" she declared.

"You're living a delusion, Jen," he merely said.

She stared at him angrily.

"Can you love? Can you..." He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, she was still standing there, watching him with that pissed off look in her eyes. She hadn't pounced on him and swallowed him down in one gulp, hadn't broken his neck.

He put his hands up, meeting her eyes.

She offered him nothing but hatred back. He hadn't expected anything else, in honesty.

Cursing his idiocy, he took a step towards her. And then another, and another. Until he was standing mere inches from her, so close he could count the spots on her face. He closed his eyes - Oh, heck! - and leaned closer, and whispered into her ear, "You may be able to grow, but you'll never be her, you'll never be like _us_."

Jennifer's ganger hissed, full of fury.

He opened his eyes. "You will never know the happiness Jennifer's parents felt when she was born, the pain they felt when she was hurting, when they hear she's gone. And I don't think you even _care_!" He drew back and met her eye. "Tell the truth! You don't care, do you! You're only thinking of one person, and that's you! You don't care about the others, you only care about you! You're nothing like Jen."

"I am Jennifer Lucas!" she screamed.

"No, you're just a sorry imitation. Too afraid to face the truth. You're alive, but you're not who you thought you were. You don't _know_ who you are. Life isn't the comfortable lie you'd imagined it to be; you can't hide behind Jen anymore. You can't blame Jen for this, for all the things you've done, the things you've thought or felt. The pain inside!" He snapped his fingers and she shuddered. "We _all_ feel pain, you little idiot! Wake up! Open your eyes!"

"My eyes are open!" she hissed.

"And yet, they're not! They're still not! You're still trying to live Jennifer's life!"

"I am-"

"Stop! STOP! Stop it! Stop saying that you're her! You are not her! She's dead!"

"You're hurting my ears!" Jennifer's ganger screamed back at him.

"You _killed_ her!"

"She left me no choice! You, _you lot_ left me no choice!"

He gave a bitter laugh, eyes bright. "No, that's just your excuse! Think! THINK! You're _smarter_ than that! In life, there is no easy way out, no easy answers, no easy excuses! Why _lie_ to yourself! You want to _live_, you want _us_ to face up to _our_ misdeeds, _our_ wrongdoings, but _you_ don't want to face _the truth_! Why can't you face it! You're one of us, now. You're no _better_ than us! Look at what you've done!"

"You would kill me! You don't _care_! I've only done what I've had to do - to survive!"

"No, love, I think you've moved beyond 'what you had to do, to survive'," he told her. "You're a killer now, the same as us. Tell me, did it make everything okay again? Did it undo the evils of the past, bring your brothers and sisters back to life, no harm done, no hurt inflicted? Did it make _you_ feel better?"

She glared at him.

"Kill me, if that's all your capable of! DO IT!"

She flinched at the loudness of his voice.

"KILL ME THEN!"

"No," she whispered, staring into his eyes.

"What's that?"

"No," she repeated.

He laughed and shook his head, then grabbed up her hands, placing them around his neck. "Oh, I know you _want_ to!"

"No, it did not make me feel better!" she yelled, suddenly, and yanked her hands back, glaring at him.

He didn't seem to know what to say to that. He stared at the ground, for a long moment. "What will you do now?" he asked finally.

She crunched one hand up into a shaking fist, by her side. "I want to live! I want to... be a mother!"

He laughed shortly. "You have no idea, do you? You're like a child."

Jennifer's ganger glowered at him darkly, in offense and disgust. "I am not a child!" she spat. "They torture and murder my... my kind, and they think nothing of it. They are murderers! Nothing but filthy murderers! Would _you_ stand by and allow them to go on murdering your brothers and sisters, Buzz! Would you?"

"Oh, trust me; if history has proven anything, it's that sometimes, to survive, you have no other choice. You can stand up and join your brothers and sisters, and you can die together, or you can keep quiet and live, as second-class citizens, with this terrible guilt hanging over you, in constant persecution and mistreated your whole life..." He trailed away. "You and 'your kind' are not the first, you know. Don't you think it, for one second!"

Her eyes flashed. "You would-"

"I don't know," he mumbled. "I've been relatively lucky, I suppose you can say. I've never been faced with that decision, before."

"Before now," she replied.

He met her eyes, his gaze hard. "If you persist, we _will_ be enemies! You might as well kill me now!"

She narrowed her eyes, giving it some thought. Could it really be true? Could she be... her own person? Could she have been "having a moment"? No, she was right. She was not wrong. What they had done to her kind was wrong, evil. It needed to be stopped. _They_ needed to be stopped! But perhaps there was some other way; some other way that would not end in her death. The Doctor had said he would help. Had he been lying? And even if he hadn't, would anyone really listen to him? _I want to know life_, she thought. _I want to _feel_ alive!_

She felt conflicted, confused. She didn't know what to do. She wished she could have asked Rory, or... or Jennifer. She stared at her hands, turning them over so she could see the lines in her palms, staring hard at her "life line". Which one was it again? Had Jennifer known all along she would die when she did? Had it been written in her life line? Was her life line the same as Jennifer's, or different?

She looked up, at Buzzer. "Will you stand with me, or will you cower, like a coward?"

He shrugged one shoulder. "'Ow should I know, Jen?"

"You _should_ know!" she hissed.

"Will you stand with me, if I stand with you, or will you kill me, the second I turn my back on you, just because I'm human, and not Flesh?"

She grinned. "How should I know, Buzzer!"

He shook his head. "There's your answer then," he said quietly. He sighed. "What's it to be then? Kill me, or don't kill me?" He sighed again and held out his hand to her.

.

"What's this?" the Doctor - the Doctor's ganger, Buzzer reminded himself - asked, catching sight of the pair of them, hand in hand.

"I don't know," Jennifer's ganger said. "I don't know. I think... I want to live. I need to think."

"Anyone who's ever lived would agree, I'm sure," the Doctor's ganger told her. "Don't we all just want to live?"

She narrowed her eyes, darting a quick glance in Buzzer's direction. _Not him_, she felt like saying. _He kept trying to convince me to kill him._ She swallowed that thought, and frowned. "You said you could help, Doctor."

.

She had had her hair cut short, now that it was warmer, the sky clear and blue, and she'd changed her name to Jacob. She didn't care at all if it was a man's name. She was alone, alone in the world, but, for now, that suited her fine.

Some headway was being made along the lines of getting people more open to seeing that gangers were alive, too, and shouldn't have been mistreated the way they were, but it was minimal, and there was still a lot of opposition to it. As there would be for many, many years to come, she thought. A war with the humans never would have changed that. That may have been their solve-all, but it was not her people's, it would not be her people's, she decided.

She was beginning to realise that she was not human, that she did not function by human conventions. She'd learnt that patience was admirable, desirable, that it could make life... better; that it could give you a new viewpoint. That tolerance was like love, it opened hearts, it gave you the space to see others as they truly were, as having merit, also, as having worth; and that it gave you a great freedom. That it allowed you to truly love.

She found that she liked music. Joana Amendoeira was a favourite, as was classical, baroque. She liked to be alone on a dark night, with just the wind for company and the smell of the earth, or on a cloud-covered beach, with the sounds of the ocean lapping at the shore accompanying her soft, almost soundless footsteps. The time to reflect calmed her, to feel just what she wanted to feel, without the interference of others. It was a time when she could sort through her feelings and decide which to grant greater attention, which to discuss with others, and which could be set aside.

She was pleasantly surprised, when, passing through the train station on a Thursday, she spied a familiar face, and found herself walking that way. The man looked to be falling asleep, but he woke up when she called his name. "Buzzer!"

He sat up straighter and rubbed his eye, looking up into her face. He frowned. "J-" He rubbed his eye again. Katy Perry's _One of the Boys_ was playing over the PA. He wasn't one of Katy's biggest fans.

"I go by Jacob now," she offered.

He got to his feet, nodding. He didn't seem bothered by the fact that it was a man's name, although that might have had something to do with the fact that he was still quite weary-looking. "How've you been, then?" he asked, frowning at a nearby clock, momentarily.

"Alive," she replied, with a small smile.

He sighed, dug a hand into a pocket. "You drink coffee?" He'd found some coins in his pocket, obviously thinking about getting something from the vending machine a couple of feet away.

"Yes."

He returned the coins to his pocket, then took them out again, half turning one way, then turning the other way quickly. Yes, the machine was that way, wasn't it. He nodded and gestured ahead of him with a hand, then started walking that way.

She walked after him.

Later, they'd taken a seat on a nearby bench, holding paper cups of hot coffee. The steam that rose from her cup drifted up to touch her cheeks, making them soggy. Jacob glanced out at the blue sky, the warm day. "Are you just passing through?" she asked, turning to glance at the man sitting beside her.

"Yeh."

"Working?"

He nodded silently and took a sip of his coffee gingerly.

She looked down at her own cup. "Yes. Here, too. You can never win." She looked away from her hot drink and noticed that his hair was a bit scruffy. How long had it been since he'd gotten a proper night's sleep? She glanced at the cup in his hand, to make sure he wasn't about to spill it all over himself, then back up to his face.

"Jacob?"

"Yes?"

"Why didn't you kill me?"

She frowned. She hadn't been expecting a question like that, but what was more troubling was his tone, as though he was implying that she ought have done so, that she'd just let in him for a world of hurt, by not doing so.

She turned and deposited of her paper cup on the bench beside her and turned back, reaching out a hand and placing it uncertainly on his arm. "You're tired," she told him.

He looked up, into her eyes, his expression surprisingly lucid, suprisingly aware. "I don't think so."

"Oh, Buzzer, it's obvious."

He laughed. "Life's never what you expect, is it?"

"No, it isn't," she agreed. "Sometimes, it... surprises you."

"Not much surprises me anymore," he replied wearily.

"Oh, come on, that's not the right attitude to take," she told him, but he didn't even get annoyed with her; he didn't say anything back. He was staring out at the train tracks. She suddenly felt... unsure, afraid. She wanted to take a firm hold of his arm. She took her hand from his arm, instead.

She didn't have the first clue how to reach him. Disappointment lodged itself in her chest, turning her off her coffee. Why couldn't she find the right words? Why couldn't she say something, anything? He'd helped her once before, and yet, she couldn't even repay the favour.

Despite not wanting it, she reached for her cup, for something to hold, and found herself sipping it, all the same. It was drinkable, now; not too hot.

His eyes were empty.

Watching him, her heart felt hollow. She suddenly wished she knew him better, more than his favourite singer or his nickname. Why had Jennifer never gotten to know her co-workers better? she wondered. She'd been too shy to, probably.

She really wasn't all that much like Jennifer, Jacob thought slightly sadly. She'd never really known Jen, either. Not really. And she never would.

She shifted closer to Buzzer, on the bench, wondering if he'd mind much if she rested her head on his shoulder, just for a little bit. She didn't know of any other way to reach him. She rested her head on his shoulder, closing her eyes.

After a few moments, she heard him start to hum some Dusty Springfield number and she felt a little better, her heart felt a little brighter.

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End file.
